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An anonymous reader writes "The IEEE MAN/LAN Standards Committee — better known as the people who brought us Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth — is celebrating its 30th anniversary next week. This article has interviews with the original committee chairman and other veteran members, and reveals some of the inside situation. It also looks at some of the upcoming 802.x standards including one that sends data by modulating visible light."

true but this is for wireless light transmission. You see IEEE has been watching old sci fi series and thought they needed more blinking lights in the real future. So each one of those blinky lights is in reality an active data connection for some device.

In case people don't get it, with the current WiFi standards you cannot have an easy way for a Cafe/Hotel/Conference to provide encrypted wireless connections to guests in a way where they cannot snoop on each other's connections. if you use preshared key users can decrypt each other's traffic. If you use username and password, it's far more inconvenient for the user and the service provider.

Agree. Wireless security was really broken from the start, and has got only slightly better, slowly...Interoperability between devices from different vendors is not so bad now.On the other hand, if you travel around the world you can actually enjoy the convenience of wirelessly connecting to the internet almost anywhere.(The other day I did a free conf call, via Wifi in some airport terminal, with three people in three different continents, using my bluetooth headset on a cheap laptop...could you imagine t

WEP despite being "Wired Equivalent Privacy" was nowhere near that. And if you check, WPA2 Personal is nowhere near that either when it comes to guest usage (which I claim makes up a significant proportion of WiFi usage).

The fact that an attacker can be safely somewhere else makes it a whole different ballgame, if the IEEE bunch didn't realize that then that is just more evidence that they screwed up.

In case people don't get it, with the current wired Ethernet standards, you cannot have an easy way for a Cafe/Hotel/Conference to provide encrypted wired connections to guests in a way where they cannot snoop on each other's connections either. If you want security, you should be using end-to-end encryption.

Ethernet (which you still have to set to 1000/Full because Auto-negotiate doesn't work properly)Wi-Fi (how many years has it taken for N to become standard? I've been through three pre-N routers....)Bluetooth (which is infamous for not working between devices by different manufacturers, to the point that no-one bothers with it. Oh and you get spammed).

After decades of having to deal with this nonsense, yes - I'd have a few questions for them. Right after setting them on fi

Just a little pompous? The miracle is that equipment from hundreds of different suppliers can inter-operate at all. As imperfect as it is, I have a lot of admiration for the IEEE standardisation process, for what it has achieved. Those who work with IEEE standards (distinct from those who use the final product) will grumble about shortcomings, but still get excited when you can plug "A" into "B" and it works.

Man, how ungratefull can you get. Why dont you go out and develop you own "standard" wireless protocol and see how long it takes you!

The only hardware I've ever had an auto-negotiate issue with is Cisco switches, on many occasions with completely different clients over many years. Everyone else seems to play nice, but Cisco was well known for implementing their own "standard" early.

Dell put out some switches that really didn't autonegotiate well(not even with the onboard NICs of Dell computers, just for giggles). Their switches always sucked, though, so that wasn't a giant surprise.

Man, how ungratefull can you get. Why dont you go out and develop you own "standard" wireless protocol and see how long it takes you!

Err...no, that's what they were supposed to be doing. Or do you think an eight-year lead time is acceptable? And your answer is stupid anyway - you don't say 'well write your own OS' when someone complains about Windows.

The only hardware I've ever had an auto-negotiate issue with is Cisco switches, on many occasions with completely different clients over many years. Everyone else seems to play nice, but Cisco was well known for implementing their own "standard" early.

Which tells me exactly how much networking hardware you've actually worked with, so let me fill you in - ISCSI not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Backup Exec not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Network generally slow? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. I could list around 20 mor

The IEEE is a standards body, not an enforcement one. If a manufacturer wishes to deviate from the standard, there's nothing that the IEEE can do about it. In the time I've been doing this I've learned this about vendor equipment: There's a standard and then there's the way that a vendor chooses to implement the standard.

Every manufacturer I've worked with has added "features" that make them not-completely-compatible with equipment from other manufactuers. Sure, they'll work, sometimes completely, but not c

Which tells me exactly how much networking hardware you've actually worked with, so let me fill you in - ISCSI not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Backup Exec not working? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full. Network generally slow? Set all adaptors to 1000/Full.

Let me fill you in - if auto-negotiation is failing, there's something wrong with your hardware or cabling. Forcing your adapters to a specific setting just makes the problem less visible - you still have the same shitty defective adapters/switche

You only have to google to see that the 1000/Full thing (and the Windows autotuning problem) is down to there being *no standards*. It can be caused by different firmware, mixed hardware, different NIC's, the list is quite long.

Ethernet (which you still have to set to 1000/Full because Auto-negotiate doesn't work properly)Wi-Fi (how many years has it taken for N to become standard? I've been through three pre-N routers....)Bluetooth (which is infamous for not working between devices by different manufacturers, to the point that no-one bothers with it. Oh and you get spammed).

After decades of having to deal with this nonsense, yes - I'd have a few questions for them. Right after setting them on fire.

Heh, I was in the room at an IEEE 802 meeting when someone actually apologized for having insisted gig-e even have a half-duplex mode.

Wi-Fi (how many years has it taken for N to become standard? I've been through three pre-N routers....)Bluetooth (which is infamous for not working between devices by different manufacturers, to the point that no-one bothers with it. Oh and you get spammed).

Well, it's your fault for buying pre-N equipment in the N case. After all, they couldn't get consensus on how N should work, which is why it took so long. Every manufacturer implements their own idea on how to do it, especially if there was no standard.

In the Bilski case, IEEE filed a brief pushing *for* software patents [swpat.org]. Maybe specific groups in IEEE, like the 802 group, should push for a change in this position. Having the whole wifi industry paying a tax to CSIRO [swpat.org] for a wifi patent must make this group a little more clued in about the harm caused.

I am staggered how complicated it is to setup WiFi a lay-person. Far too much jargon (SSID, WPA, WPA2, WEP, TKIP, AES+TKIP, channels...), and stupid ideas like multiple WEP keys. Let alone connecting via ethernet, change the subnet, browse to an IP address, etc etc etc just to get it going. What an awful decade of design.

Look... from day 1 we just wanted a secret password.

Public networks are different and need to be publicly identified - don't shoe-horn it into the same user interface.

Cool. I've worked with Paul Nikolich (when ADC broadband bought bought the CMTS company he was at), and have run into some of this cast of characters during the 802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile meetings. Interesting folks.

I think it was Geoff (I could be wrong, this was a while ago) that said we would not need high-speed uplink from the home because 'there just isn't that much relevant content out there'. That was a pretty good chuckler.

I'm sure Michael Coden of Codenoll feels snubbed, he always claimed to me he was the co-inventor of ethernet.Never believed him.He did pioneer one interesting product- a distributed ethernet switch that would operate over a unidirectional fiber ring- worked pretty well after I fixed the gaping hole in his protocol.